He knocks at the rude hut, where an old watchman is trying to sleep beside a few embers of charcoal, and guarding the boat that is chained to a stake just below on the marshy lagoon—or blue and white cotton cloth which represents the historical watercourse that bore Sogoro away on his desperate mission. Sogoro is recognised with joy by the watchman, who tries his best to dissuade him from going, but at last agrees to row him on his way, and breaks the chain, thus defying the law of the daimyo.
The direct appeal is made when the Shogun, after a hawking expedition, stops to rest at the shrine sacred to his ancestors in what is now known as Uyeno Park (Tokyo). The retinue is passing over a bridge connecting two red-lacquered buildings. Sogoro throws his petition, which a sympathetic follower of the Shogun secretes in his sleeve, and the procession passes on, leaving Sogoro bound, a martyr to the cause of the suffering country people.
Whenever this play is produced in Tokyo, the actors taking part repair to the district of Sakura where Sogoro lived and pay their respects to his shrine, likewise a little shrine is erected within the theatre where offerings of sake, fruit, and vegetables are made before the spirit of the man who died that the wrongs of the people might be righted.
Nakamura Kichiyemon as Sakura Sogoro, the Village Head who sacrificed his life for the good of the people.
VII
Love tragedies were in high favour, as may be seen by the number of plays produced that have for motive shinju, or the double suicide of unfortunate lovers who hope by departing this life to obliterate their sins and omissions and to be united in the after-world. Invariably the settings of these romances were the immoral quarters.
Chikamatsu Monzaemon wrote several pieces of this character, and they were so popular that they had a great deal to do with the encouragement of young people to become partners in the shuffling-off of this mortal coil.
If Chikamatsu had written little else, his characters Jihei and Koharu would save his name from oblivion. This piece, Sayo Shigure Tenno Amijima (lit., Evening-shower-heaven-net-island), was first staged in 1720 in the Osaka Doll-theatre, when Chikamatsu was in the sixties. He had taken an excursion to the ancient Shinto Shrine of Sumiyoshi, near Osaka, when the news reached him of the double suicide of a couple called Jihei and Koharu. He ordered his palanquin-bearers to carry him home as quickly as they could, and within his dwelling seized paper and writing brush and elaborated the ideas that had come to his mind, scarcely stopping to take breath until the play was finished.
Koharu is a belle of the Kinokuniya, a house in the Osaka pleasure quarters, and Jihei conducts a prosperous paper shop, and has a wife, O-San, and two children. His wife has been bestowed upon him by his parents, and as she is not his own choice, his wandering fancy is captivated by Koharu. He forgets everything in his infatuation, and is on the brink of ruin when O-San writes to Koharu asking her to give up Jihei. This Koharu consents to do after a struggle between her apparent duty and her love for the young man. Jihei, unacquainted with the facts, believes her false and mercenary.